


Gratitude

by jtsbar



Series: Without Names [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-14
Updated: 2011-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:11:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jtsbar/pseuds/jtsbar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>set during and after TGG</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gratitude

The euphoria lasts for two days - the ecstatic gratitude that she is alive, that air moves into her lungs, that blood surges through her veins, that she can see her husband at the end of the green hospital corridor and break into a run toward his arms.  
It lasts until the next bomb (it wasn't the next, but she wasn't to know that until later) goes off, blasting twelve people, ages 3 months to 87 years, into oblivion.  
It is a week before DI Lestrade has any time to see her. She'd thanked the officers (a man and a woman) who'd rescued her, though she'd barely been able to tell at the time who they were or what she said, through the bomb suit masks and her own gasping tears.  
But she also has to, has to, see the man who'd sent them. Who'd solved the madman's game, at least for her. Who'd silenced the taunting voice. Not that she'd actually heard it, though it will seem, forever she thinks, as if she had. The voice of a hyena, whooping up and down the registers of normal human speech, pulling and tearing at the fabric of sound, of sense, of what she had taken for granted was her life.  
That life had been taken. And then it had been given back to her.  
She doesn't know how to balance the joy of that against the confused tumult of guilt that she has lived, and the twelve people in the seven flats in a part of London she's never been to have died.  
Sergeant Donovan (all brisk kindness) shows her into the glass-walled office, and DI Lestrade, silver-haired and handsome, stands up, comes around the desk and takes both her hands in his.  
He hardly gives her a chance to thank him, just starts asking how she is getting on, reiterating that they'll keep her identity secret so she'll not be bothered by the press. (She suppresses a wild impulse to laugh at that, at the idea of a few obnoxious journalists being a problem – her baseline of what constitutes a problem having been, she expects, permanently reset.)  
All his words are kind. But his voice is wrong. It isn't the voice she'd heard on the phone, the voice she had really heard, the human one. Surprised, questioning, insistent. Younger, she thinks. Lestrade is sure of himself, she can see that, but still worn down a bit by his years, some of the rough edges honed smooth. The other man, the one who had talked through her to the madman, was not humbled yet by life.  
In this she is wrong. Because she had talked to him...before. 

Before the old woman died while he held her voice in his hand. And the others with her. Before the boy was apparent seconds from death. Before the pool. And John.  
Sherlock Holmes does not leave John's side. Has not left it since John had flung the two of them into the water, anticipating when Sherlock would pull the trigger, and catapulting up from the tiles just that fraction of a second before, giving him enough time to push Sherlock, the gun recoiling in his hand from the shot, into the pool, John's arms tight around him, their bodies twisting in the air, John making himself a bleeding shield between Sherlock and the brunt of the blast.  
There is enough time, sitting there by the bed, for Sherlock to hate John for what he'd done. The fractured skull, the broken leg, the tissues around the spine contused and swollen to the point of indeterminacy as to whether John would walk again. Useless, stupid, bloody senseless he could rage at the quiet body in the bed. You could have thrown yourself backwards, away from the main force of the bomb, you could have saved yourself most of this damage. And Sherlock tells himself he too would have survived, if not perfectly, at least well enough to rise and hunt.  
As he is doing now. Mycroft is not the only one with strings to pull. And Sherlock does. Every debt, of gratitude, or shame, or fear, owed to him, Sherlock now collects. Others, Mycroft included, (he could almost smile at that) will do the legwork for the time being. Until John is better. But he will put the pieces together, and find where the emptiness sits at the heart of the puzzle, because that is where Moriarty will be. And Sherlock will find him.  
He does not let himself succumb to gratitude. That John is alive. That he himself is alive. There is no time. Not until John wakes up. Not until Moriarty is dead.  
Sherlock does not allow himself to consider that there are others with a claim. That others have suffered and bled and lost. He will find Moriarty. And he will finish him.  
And then he will let himself be grateful, for that, and for the rest. Sherlock lets his left hand move away from the computer for just a moment. Lets his fingers barely touch the pulse in John's wrist, lets them move sweat-stiffened hair back from John's forehead, lets them rest, for just a moment, on the rise and fall of his chest. Tells himself that he is doing no more than checking the accuracy of the machines entangled with the body of his friend.

It is a year before she is able to thank him. By then what happened inhabits her nightmares more than her waking hours. She wonders if it is the same for him – this tall man with steel-grey eyes. There are bruises beneath those eyes, and behind them, too, she thinks. The kind that come with sleeplessness and the desperate reasons for those long wakeful hours in the darkness. But he is charming, and patient with her. And Mrs. Hudson (landlady? housekeeper?) fusses over her like a long-lost friend (though she still doesn't feel comfortable asking for the recipe for the best scones she's ever tasted in her life). The quiet man in the armchair, who sat down quickly once they were introduced and had shaken hands, shares the same shadows in his eyes. When, after half an hour, she and DI Lestrade get up to take their leave, Dr. Watson (not practicing just at the moment, he said, taking a sabbatical of sorts), is not standing until she turns around from retrieving her purse where she left it on the floor beside the sofa. Sherlock Holmes has moved in that brief moment to his friend's side, and though they do not touch each other as she looks at them together, she knows without a shred of doubt (after those hours when all certainty had been torn from her, she has worked to reconstruct, like winding threads of steel together, what she believes in and will never again let be torn from her) that each man is standing because of the other beside him.


End file.
